Some progress on my attempt to use World of Warcraft on Ubuntu Linux has been made – in fact, with enough tweaking I’ve managed to get a decent frame rate and eliminate the icon artifacts I was getting. Most of the tweaks involved editing the Config.wtf file World of Warcraft store it’s settings in.

This screenshot was taken under Ubuntu Linux 7.10, standing a little ways outside of Orgrimmar. It’s hard to see at this size, but the frame rate is 21fps. Up top where the location name appears there is some icons from the top toolbar in Gnome flickering through.

Next up is Adobe Photoshop CS2. While the program installed and appeared to run – I initially messed up with the installers – reloading the CD got me the Setup.exe I needed. Licensing is still a pain with this program. It will not connect over the Internet to Adobe’s servers, and the activate by telephone option exits with an error stating there is not enough disk space. (There is)

I wiped out the installation and reinstalled, opting for the 30 day trial option. At least I can use it for a month while I figure out how to get the appropriate registry keys recognized. There is no point calling Adobe for this since they do not support Linux.

Multitrack Studio for Windows is a program I’ve used from time to time to record and mix music ideas. There are other programs for Linux available, I just wanted to see if it would work. It does, although stopping playback can cause it to stutter into an audio loop and crash with a buffer underrun error more often than not.

Although iTunes works under Linux with Wine, I was unhappy with the performance – I don’t have an iPod so I was willing to try a program which was organized in the same manner, but native for Linux. I was half figuring I might need to write one, then I found Banshee. This program does it all, and it does it very nicely. It’s designed for Gnome, and Ubuntu users can install it right from the Synaptic Package Manager.

I will document the list of tweaks I did to World of Warcraft when I have time, and will update on the status of the Photoshop licensing if I get it resolved.

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